You can call them the midwives of consciousness. Dita and Janis sit on the floor next to you as you weep and convulse, whispering sweet things to that brokenness that rises to the surface. Two rebirthers, touring the world to revert the humans that come their way to the pure conscious state before any of it happened at all. They will take you to the time before you were even born, to clear the imprints that happened there. Very often we sabotage ourselves and our happiness because of those imprints. They happen in childhood because of wounds we experienced or witnessed with our caretakers. They could be as simple as negative things said that get stuck in our subconscious forever. Some of these imprints happen in the moment of birth. “Imagine what it must feel like to a newborn who is forced into the world when it was not ready to come out. Imagine being taken from the warmth and safety of the womb into the harsh hospital lights, away from the mother to get cleaned and snipped and patted on the back by people who do not and cannot give it a mother’s love in the first minutes of its birth. Imagine the trauma!” According to Dita, even this very common instance can cause some negative imprints on our existence. It is very common that when your blockages are cleared through this process- or in the myriad of other processes - you find yourself awakening to your life's purpose.

So, I told her I was born caesarean at seven months. I decided to try it. I didn’t know what I would get out of it having done a lot of inner child work before. My life's purpose had always been to be a storyteller but recently, in the past couple of years, there had always been a missing piece. Storytelling feeds the hungry creator inside me, from the moment I wrote my first "long" story and my mother read it making ecstatic sounds at my creation. Storytelling feeds my love for the fun of meeting characters that don't exist in the world of form and going on their journeys as if they were my own. Essentially, storytelling fed my mind. But my heart felt left out. I have been getting signals from my heart that it needed more than just that. more than the pride at having the power to imitate life gave me. Storytelling was not enough. Was I here in Bali looking for my purpose? I lay on the floor in their bedroom one chilly evening. The house was tucked away into a rural jungle. The night was heavy with rain, dense with promise. Dita was sitting next to me on her knees. We swam together in the lull of the feminine music. She instructed me to breath through my mouth, taking gulps of air like I was coming out of the surface of water with every inhale. “Conscious connected breathing,” she said, “Don’t pause between your inhales and exhales. And keep going. Don’t stop.” The breath work was meant to take me to an altered state of consciousness. It felt unnatural. Or maybe it was natural but we, as frazzled human beings buried under expectations and everyday stress are too traumatized by existence to breathe the way we were meant to breathe. My chest began to constrict and resist. “Open your jaw wider! Like you’re coming out of water!” Dita insisted. My jaws hurt. My chest hurt. Soon my hands began to get numb. Two bee hives buzzed in my palms. Earlier, Dita sat with me and we talked about my main concerns. I was ashamed to admit my troubles to her. Not just to her but also to myself, to the Universe. “I can’t believe in God’s miracles. I can’t believe in magic. I really want to. I desperately want to. I’m tired of science and accumulative reason telling us what we can and can’t do.” “Do you think you are worthy of God’s miracles?” she asked. That was the question. Aye there’s the rub… As we traversed even deeper in the breath work, the numbness spread from my palms to my arms. My heart began to pump sadness through the compression in my chest as I slipped into nowhere. “What are you feeling?” she asked gently. The numbness was spreading to my face. My speech was slurred. “Sa’ness” I said. “You are sad because…?” I couldn’t say it. But I had to. “Because of the separation.” “Separation from who?” “F’om God.” “You’re separated because…?” That’s what I wanted to know. I shook my head. No words. The sadness arriving in full speed now, thick and deep like war trenches. My sobs came as raspy chokes. My face was like a newborn wailing but no sound came out because the existential rift felt so mountainous and silencing. I was resentful actually. To be in this body. No. I was not resentful. I was angry. To be here in this reality, where we couldn’t see, or hear or touch God. Dita tried to get me to talk but the silent sobs racked my body so that my chest lifted off the floor and the pain came through me. There was no denying this pain any longer. It had probably been there since the day I was born. My hands were levitated off the ground as a summons. Dita let me sob. I never sobbed like that before, like I was choking the largest question humanity has ever asked God: Why am I here? Why did you put me here? “Keep breathing,” Dita gently reminded, “Take that breath of life. Let life in.” I gasped. I gulped. When the sobs had had their way with me, I settled down. The numbness had turned now into complete oblivion and absence from the physical world. I didn’t realize that I was ascending somewhere and was slowly landing. It was a place so faceless and quiet. And there was only love. That and gardens. So many of them floated into my consciousness; visions from a distant time, an unknown place. I could see glimpses of them. Doors to gardens. Pathways to gardens. Gardens hidden behind trees. Castles in gardens in forests. And then nothing at all. Just a quiet thrum in my entire being.

I love you was the cushion that held me there in place for a while. You’re safe. You’re here. The thrum grew and spread. The soft primordial ringing that I often heard in meditation was a loud rush now, working through me. I felt like, in my palms, I was holding two big balls of energy. I could feel the weight and heat of them. And then all subsided like a wave does on a beach, leaving the sand to glisten and moan in delight. I opened my eyes. Later I asked Dita, if my hands were really levitating off the floor. She said they were on the floor the whole time. Even after this first cathartic experience, I didn’t think I needed to do this process another time. Breathing through your open mouth like every breath is your first breath of life is not an easy thing to do. It certainly isn’t fun if you’re not used to it. But I went to the group session that Dita and Janis prepared the next day. We were going to be reborn together, all of us, a gang from different parts of the world, coming together to put pinpricks light into accumulative consciousness.

After an hour of ecstatic dance, we all settled down on the floor in an open yoga studio in the middle of a writhing sighing forest. And the breathing began. We were told that different things could come up for different people. Some felt pain, anger or resentment. Some people were even reputed to get up and dance in the middle of it. For me this time, it was utter and complete bliss from beginning to end. The breath came in in large cool streams that traveled down undisturbed. My chest was accepting life again. I heard sobs around me as I breathed, even from the men. Someone emitted some strange sounds in the thick of the session. But I heard those things only like gauze in the back of my mind when I drifted back to the studio from those gardens in my consciousness. Then I would float back into the green. In and out of secret spots, hidden copses of trees, hidden clumps of sweet floral things. Stone walls. Ivy. Tropical flowers. Thick verdant jungles. The breaths were life for me this time and I understood why I needed to do it again, to see this, to witness a blockage disappeared. In integration, the last stage of the process, the freeway in my soul came to the conclusion, that it was worthy of magic, of anything and everything. It came to the crystalline conclusion that it was magic. The music in the background drifted over to confirm...

Do you know you're beautiful...

Do you know you're beautiful...

From the Eden around the studio...

I open my eyes and lay there, awash with a new and lush brand of joy. This must be how a bud feels when it's time to open. It felt like celebration. So I got up when it was over and danced my way out in the middle of the jungle rain because the singing in my cells was louder than reason, louder than anything and it sang like coconut milk.

I had been waiting for the real magic start, especially after my disappointing encounter with Cok Rai - who may have been right about my unbalanced hormones, by the way - but I did not realize that for any kind of magic to happen, I had to believe first. As Damien, a British energy healer and one of the fellow newborns in the group, said to me that night, when we all gathered over kombucha, "It's not seeing is believing. It's believing is seeing."

I am convinced that this is the paradigm of the new Earth. Damien looked for signs of recognition on my face. And the believing part that was just rebirthed smiled back at him.

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